The SEC flexed its muscles again this week, vowing that its football coaches will participate in satellite recruiting camps all over the country unless the NCAA stops other leagues from doing the same by next summer.
It’s not that the SEC wants its coaches to conduct such camps. To the contrary, the SEC long has had a rule against the practice and long has wanted the NCAA to adopt the same rule nationally. But other leagues have resisted such legislation, leading the SEC to conclude its best chance to end the camps might be to threaten to join them.
“We are going to make every effort to have our rule adopted nationally,” SEC commissioner Mike Slive said at the league’s spring meetings. “If the rule isn’t adopted nationally, come next summer, our folks will be free to fan out all over the country and have at it.”
Absent a conference regulation to the contrary, NCAA rules allow a school’s coaches to participate in satellite camps — defined as camps for recruits held more than 50 miles from campus — if the coaches partner with a host institution. That provision allowed Penn State coach James Franklin to appear at a Georgia State camp last summer; will allow Ohio State coach Urban Meyer to attend a camp in Boca Raton, Fla., next month; and will allow Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh to join nine camps in nine days next month, from California to Florida.
Alabama coach Nick Saban has called such camps “ridiculous.” But with three power leagues allowing them (Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12) and two power leagues disallowing them (SEC and ACC), concerns of a recruiting disadvantage swept the SEC meetings.
“All of us are against it, obviously,” South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier said, referring to SEC coaches, “but there comes a point that we need to start doing it to keep up with Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, northern schools that come into the south.”
So SEC athletic directors voted to drop the league’s restriction against such camps effective in summer 2016 if the NCAA hasn’t outlawed them by then.
The threat is reminiscent of last year’s vow by the SEC to spin off from NCAA Division I and start “Division IV” unless the power conferences were granted autonomy to make some of their own rules. Such autonomy was approved a couple of months later.
It appears less likely the SEC will get its way this time, although Greg Sankey, who will succeed the retiring Slive as commissioner Aug. 1, estimated there’s a “fair chance” of getting a national ban passed.
If the SEC can’t beat the camps, many of its coaches have vowed during this week’s meetings to join them whole-heartedly.
“They talked very specifically … about their intent to canvass the nation if we’re in the same circumstance next year,” Sankey said.
“Should that not be a violation, I promise you, we’ll do it all summer next year,” LSU coach Les Miles said. “Next year, we’ll be in all different locations.”
Georgia coach Mark Richt seemed less enthusiastic about the idea.
“The biggest concern for me is just the amount of time they would take from our coaches,” Richt said. “I really would like our coaches to see their wives and kids once in a while.”
Also, Richt said, Georgia has no real need for the off-campus camps: “We at Georgia are blessed to be in a great state, a great area of the country, and we’ve never had problems getting kids to come to our campus.”
Still, he said, it “could be problematic” if the SEC continued to ban the practice while other leagues allowed it.
“If nothing changes nationwide by next summer, we’ll do it,” Richt said. “We may decide to have a camp up north or wherever it may be.”
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